A man was putting $30 tickets on the windshields of people parked near the house at 2290 Saxony Court on Sunday afternoon. This was kind of adorable of him.

The people with conspicuously little regard for things like “distance from curb” were participating in a Ritchies auction. The poorer among them bid on diamond rings and Persian rugs. The richer competed for a 1-kilogram bar of gold, a rare Hermes Birkin handbag, and the 18,000-square-foot house itself.

The Mississauga mansion, located near Mississauga Rd. and the QEW, was built and owned by Ambassador Fine Custom Homes proprietor Michal Cerny, who once listed it for $11 million. After it sat on the market for three years, Cerny decided to sell it off to the highest bidder.

People lined up in the cold and snow to get in. In the manner of a club bouncer, a woman guarding the door attempted to deter late-arriving gawkers by telling them the seven-bedroom, nine-bathroom palace was “at capacity.” The ones who made it past this sentry were asked to take off their stylish shoes and add them to the kind of wet pile familiar to attendees of children’s birthday parties.

In their socks and hospital-style foot covers, they laughed and talked as Ritchies managing director Kashif Khan auctioned off four-figure items: rings, bracelets, paintings. They fell silent when he got to the house he called “a castle” that is “supposed to be here for a thousand years.”

Khan, standing at a podium in the grand foyer, asked for an opening bid of $7 million, the amount he said Cerny had spent building it.

“No,” someone said.

He asked for $6 million. “No,” someone else said.

Someone offered $3 million. The bidding proceeded quickly to $6 million. And then it stalled.

Someone eventually bid $6.2 million. Nobody would go to $6.3 million. Khan began his practised begging.

“Folks, if you’re close to it, you don’t want to miss it by $100,000 here or there. The hardwood floor costs more than that,” he said. “There’s $700,000 in cabinetry. There’s hundred-thousand-dollar decisions made every day on this house. ‘Do we spend $300,000 on this cabinet or $400,000 on this cabinet?’”

Silence. Khan: “We can’t let it go at that price, folks. Can’t let it go. Maybe two or three of you can get together and move in together.”

He elicited laughter but no more bids, and he let it go. The winner was a woman in a nice coat who said “no” when asked by a reporter if she was the winner. The realtor, high-end specialist Sam McDadi, told reporters “two minutes” as he led the woman to a closed-door meeting from which he did not emerge for more than an hour. Others in the room chattered.

They believed, variously, that the mystery woman had gotten herself a bargain or that she was foolish for taking on Cerny’s folly.

Mark Wai, a home builder who said he bid a “more-than-reasonable” $4 million, said Cerny had erred in building a house so big that “there is no lot.”

“You make a mistake, doesn’t mean other people do. He made a mistake,” Wai said. “Can you honestly in your head say that later on, you would make money or break even on this property?”

“Overpriced,” agreed Daniel Sheikhan, the son of Wai’s realtor. Sheikhan, who scoffed at the materials prices cited by Cerny representatives, said the house should have gone for “anything under 6 (million dollars). Five?”

“Look at the lot. Have you seen the backyard? There’s no pool in this house. There’s no backyard, there’s no pool. You can’t even get in the driveway. Honestly, any nice luxury car, you can’t fit in the garage.”

The eight-car garage?

“You can’t get it in the eight-car garage. You take, like, a Rolls-Royce Phantom — somebody like this would probably own one — and you can’t make a turn. You’re going to scrape your car on the side of the road.”

A doctor named Neil who lives in a similar-sized house nearby, though, pronounced the price “fantastic.”

“A bargain,” agreed accountant Benard Siro, who was there for the jewelry; he had predicted a price between $6.5 million and $7 million. Tavinder Malhotra, an insurance broker and financial planner, said he expected a winning bid of $7 million to $7.5 million. “So $6.2 (million), I think, is great,” he said.

At least one person at Saxony Court got an indisputable deal: the 1-kilo gold bar, worth more than $40,000 on the market, went for a bewildering $35,500.

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